Hacker News Reader

Comment by donkeyd | Hacker News Reader

I worked as a detective in the Netherlands and we had a single task; 'waarheidsvinding', which means 'finding the truth'. We didn't have the task of convicting someone or finding a crime, we had the task of finding the truth. So in a case like this, that meant finding out exactly why someone jumped or fell from a balcony.

View on HN

First of all, you obviously only did this in cases where there was some prospect that a crime might have been committed, not in any instance of something mysterious happening.

Second, the police did attempt to figure out why the man jumped from the balcony. However, without the cooperation of the other people who were in the apartment, there is really no way to know for sure. And without knowing for sure, there's little prospect of anyone being convicted of a crime. The police don't have infinite resources. At some point you have to accept that the circumstances around a death may never be fully known. This happens all the time in the real world.

> First of all, you obviously only did this in cases where there was some prospect that a crime might have been committed, not in any instance of something mysterious happening.

It's probably fair to say that nearly all mysterious deaths imply the possibility of some sort of malfeasance.

> First of all, you obviously only did this in cases where there was some prospect that a crime might have been committed, not in any instance of something mysterious happening.

How would you know if a crime has been committed or not unless you actually find out the truth about the event/situation?

"Finding out the truth" sounds almost like the goal is to uncover sets of relations that produce crime, and therefore to surveil the social world, rather than to simply look and see if its necessary to charge someone for purposes of social maintenance. The US policing and prison system is very maligned, but even for all that 95%+ of times when the police are called, nobody gets arrested and nothing happens, in fact the police just try to diffuse the situation; they are not there to get anyone arrested, but if they need to arrest someone, they will. The US is just a particularly violent place with extraordinarily well-funded police departments.

>The US is just a particularly violent place with extraordinarily well-funded police departments.

Compared to peer nations, the US spends a decidedly ordinary amount of money on the police:

https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/how-police-compare-differen...

What makes policing in the United States different is the weakness of central (i.e. federal) authority and lack of nationwide standards of training and conduct. Typical US police training is about six months, while European programs are not rarely three years (including essentially an associates degree in law enforcement). A parallel issue is civil asset forfeiture, which can amount to legitimized robbery.

Those are issues (though nobody will allow federally funded police departments in the US). Still, ideologically, if the US police were more uniformly well trained, they would still be dealing with a predominately confrontational and violent population, and they would be not only ideologically but legally obliged to stay out of things that aren't police business, like the so-called "truth" of any story. In any case, the veracity of any given narrative is for the courts, and potentially juries to decide, not a unitary, federally funded police force.

Its clear that many of the legal and police systems in European countries were built directly out of the legacy of the monarchies and/or fascism, where absolute and centralized power directly administrates the affairs of the law and the state. So even if they are more well funded, well trained, and more effective than their american counterparts, the threat of total control, and terror through domination, still looms large.

> Those are issues (though nobody will allow federally funded police departments in the US).

What? Not only are those allowed, we already have them. That's what the FBI is.

Also, if funding is your concern, it's routine for state police to be federally funded.

As Scythe pointed out, because in the US the vast majority of policing is not federally funded, its not at all uniform, so the effects of the FBI and CIA and other federal agencies in toto is negligible. And state-police, while having a larger effect than the federal agencies, also have significantly less power over local jurisdictions than local police departments. The US--and honestly this is to its credit--has remarkably strong local police departments that are funded predominantly by the residents they police. This is even parodied, or criticized, in media when they show "small town america" cops who are either totally incompetent because there is almost never crime in the town, or are in league with nefarious forces and have to be investigated by outside agencies (see Killers of the Flower Moon, which is specifically about the formation of the FBI for that purpose, even if it has expanded its purview since the early 20th century.)

Even if state police are federally funded, why does that matter? The use of that funding is still under the power of the state (or else it would be unconstitutional, for the federal government to direct how state institutions are operated).

> Even if state police are federally funded, why does that matter?

It matters quite a bit to the question of whether federally funded police would ever be allowed. You stated outright that they weren't.

> The use of that funding is still under the power of the state (or else it would be unconstitutional, for the federal government to direct how state institutions are operated).

The normal way in which federal funding operates is that they direct its usage. You're not compelled to do what they want, but if you don't, they don't give you the money.

When I said "allowed," I meant at a mass scale, at every level, uniformly in a centralized system, not some funds for specific purposes here and there. Now, certainly, there have been times when that sort of federal funding has been specifically intended to more centralize policing in the US, but in general the structure of the state is such to prevent that, unless there is a serious change to US law.

> How would you know if a crime has been committed or not unless you actually find out the truth about the event/situation?

How would the police get involved unless a crime has been reported?

It's not hard to imagine circumstances in which the police get involved because there is initially some suspicion of a crime, the police do some investigations and then stop investigating because, although many aspects of the case remain mysterious, it really doesn't look like a crime any more. (Alternatively, if it was a crime then the main suspects seem to be dead anyway so we have better things to do with our limited resources.) In fact I'm fairly certain I've read about many cases like that. Journalists might continue investigating in order to sell books and articles and satisfy the punters' curiosity but the police are no longer interested.

Everything in this story indicated foul play. It’s like all these people who fell through windows. I remember the guy who ended up impaled on the railing. Everyone knew it was a murder at the time. Certainly, the public and the journalists did. Same with the spate of oligarch deaths with, what, 2 helicopter crashes in the same region within a few months?

The parents suspected something. Once the Met started digging all the red flags should have made them take the whole affair seriously.

I mean, the daughter gives a thoroughly debunked testimony at the coroner inquest and somehow that’s normal and nothing to worry about?

So you could've done science experiments in your office then, or archaeology in the basement, and it'd have passed as doing your job.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com